I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.